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Migrating to the Cloud: Top 5 Essential Apps For Your Business

With the cloud quickly gaining popularity, it is probably becoming increasingly clear that your business can benefit from migrating to the cloud from your legacy system. While there are a number of cloud service providers, Google Apps has provided reliable, secure, and easy-to-use cloud-based computing since 2006, making it a market leader. Google Apps even offers a platform specifically for businesses: Google Apps for Business.

While Google Apps comes with a number of standard apps, there are even more available to add onto your suite in the Google Apps Marketplace. But here are the top five apps that are absolutely essential to your business.

1. Gmail for Business. Most people are familiar with it through personal use, and while you may like the idea of Gmail, you don’t want your employees having Gmail email addresses. With Google Apps for Business, companies get a unique domain and custom email addresses (user@company.com) to use on the Gmail system. Employees will have access to 25GB of storage, which is 50 times the industry average, Google-powered search to quickly find archived conversations, IM and video chat, and threaded emails to group all emails with the same subject together.

2. Google Documents are great for working independently or collaborating with others. Through Google Docs, users can create files including documents, presentations, and spreadsheets, and then edit and store these files in the cloud. Forgetting to save your work is no longer a problem, since Google Docs automatically saves for you. Owners of a file can easily share it with others who can then have access to edit the file or leave comments on it. Multiple users can collaborate in real-time by simultaneously editing Google Docs from any location, making teamwork easy. Because Google Docs are “shared,” users no longer need to attach files to emails, which eliminates concerns about forgetting to attach files or files that are too large to send.

3. Google Sites is another key tool for collaboration. With Google Sites, users can easily create a website or intranet for a specific group of people. Perfect for team projects, users can put everything from files to calendars and responsibilities on Google Sites, providing their group with one, organized location to find all pertinent information.

4. Google Calendar allows users to schedule and keep track of events on multiple calendars. Employees can set Google Calendar to send email and SMS reminders and to send RSVPs to events. Because of Google Apps’ sharing capabilities, users can share specific calendars with others so that they can easily see the calendar owner’s availability. This tool makes scheduling meetings with coworkers or clients simple.

5. Google Groups is perfect for communicating with a set of people. Instead of sending emails to and sharing documents and calendars with a list of people, users can simply send or share with an entire group. Members can also respond to emails for the entire group, which often simplifies communication with others.

This blog post is brought to you by Cloud Sherpas. Cloud Sherpas is a leading Google Appscloud service provider. As a Google Apps Authorized Reseller and Google Enterprise partner, we have migrated over one million users across all major industries from legacy, on-premise messaging systems to Google Apps, helping organizations adopt cloud computing to innovate and dramatically reduce their IT expenses. Get to know our company by checking out our Facebook page atwww.facebook.com/cloudsherpas.

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